24Storage: Removing physical interactions to empower customer service

“Using technology to disrupt the self-storage industry has always been our strategy.” 

According to Fredrik Sandelin, CEO of 24Storage, his company’s digitally focused approach to renting storage spaces and has helped the business quickly transform a from startup in 2015 to controlling the second largest market share in the country in just five years.

“Storage is a very competitive market in Sweden,” he explains. “But by developing our own digital systems, we’ve been able to fine-tune the user experience for both customers and our customer support team—ensuring we always have the best tools to manage each facility efficiently and increase the overall quality of our service.” 

This ongoing focus on digitalization has helped 24Storage do something unique in their sector and have every business process—from customer sign-up to renting and maintaining units—all controlled from one central location in Stockholm. It is a revolutionary business model that puts the customer in complete control of every aspect of their service—without needing any employees based at any facility.

“Traditionally, storage facilities would have a small staff on-site to handle everything from sales and customer support to facility management,” explains Anders Långberg, Head of Technology and IT at 24Storage. 

“But our founding team had a more disruptive, centralized and digitally-driven vision for the company. And these Microsoft technologies have allowed us to achieve it.”

Putting both customers and employees first

24Storage was started with a simple mission: to make renting storage easy for both customers and businesses. With a keen focus on digitalization and e-commerce, the company has rapidly expanded to 23 facilities across Sweden, which can all be accessed 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. 

“When we first started, we needed employees on-site to maintain each facility and serve customers while our digital approach was being developed,” says Långberg. “This experience really showed the challenges staff face when working in remote locations, and helped prove why our centralized solution was the right path.

“Having every employee working together as one team instead of in isolation is not only good for morale, it also allows us to grow efficiently—creating a stronger culture that helps build loyalty to stay with the company long-term.”

With a clear vision of the digital approach it wanted to achieve, 24Storage spent its first years working with consultants from various companies to rapidly develop these business solutions. At the start of 2019, as the company transitioned out of startup mode with a more comprehensive platform. 24Storage turned to Nexer—a member of the Microsoft Partner Network—with the aim of forming a partnership to help maintain its digital ecosystem and engineer the next stage of innovations.

“There was a lot of code we could rewrite or remove to make it easier to maintain their current system and move everything to a more standardized way of working,” says Martin Hök, Business Development and Sales Executive at Nexer. 

“We knew 24Storage really wanted to use innovation to stay ahead of the curve and deliver the best customer satisfaction. So we also created a roadmap that we are still following today—outlining several new functionalities we could implement that would help generate huge customer value over time.”

It was a roadmap that showed how an omnichannel Microsoft solution would help 24Storage create its centralized organization model and future-proof it for years to come.

Creating a centralized, data-driven infrastructure

“A digital transformation of this scale required us to understand not just the 24Storage business, but also its customers,” recalls Anders Elwin, Senior Business Consultant at Nexer. 

“This meant sitting with agents in the call center to see how they were using the current system to service customers, as well as time with the storage specialists to learn how they worked onsite. Any daily or weekly processes, along with bigger monthly facility checks that would help us consider what could be automated through technology.”

Nexer’s first task was to help streamline the existing Azure cloud-based system within the call center, by removing any custom-made code to create a more standardized platform. Staff were also currently using two different applications to service customers—with no business processes in place to help sync the data. 

“Accounts were being created and managed manually without any centralized structure,” says Elwin. “This was a chance for us to rebuild through Dynamics 365—go back and create these business processes within the Azure system to not only link all the data together, but also integrate with Azure to enable bookings and payments to be taken through the same platform.”

With Microsoft Dynamics 365 now fully implemented through the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, 24Storage’s omnichannel solution was starting to take shape—creating a dashboard with a complete view of both customer and facility data, as well as additional functionality that handled any front-end marketing, e-commerce, and administrative services.

“When we started, 24Storage had very little analytics. So extending their existing Power BI solution to make sense of all this data was a must,” he adds. “It provided a clear financial and operational overview of each facility, which helped managers prioritize what the call center should focus on and any additional services customers might need. 

“We also used these reports to help make data-driven decisions more efficiently, including a tool we developed that fetched competitor prices and automatically matched them to 24Storage in real time —helping them act quickly and stay ahead of the market.”

The benefits of a remote working business model

Now in 2020, 24Storage has the complete digital-first approach they set out to achieve. Each facility can be operated remotely by a centralized team in Stockholm, with all customer interactions either taking place online or via video conferencing tools within each site. This streamlined and more cost-efficient process is helping to increase customer and employee satisfaction across the board.

“24Storage now has no employees actually based at any facility,” explains Hök. “Customers speak with sales and customer service through a 4K screen, and with a full suite of security cameras and remotely operated locks onsite; entire facilities can be remotely operated as if someone was actually there. 

“It’s an amazing achievement that can help the business grow quickly, while keeping the same employee headcount as before.” 

This remote working model also proved valuable in the months to come, as COVID-19 restrictions caused businesses to close their doors and enforce new social distancing rules. But for 24Storage, this was a change the company was more than ready for.

“Our whole sales process is digital, which means contract signing, rental agreements, and payments can be done online—even when the call center isn’t open,” says Långberg. “It meant we were able to keep each facility operational with very little impact during COVID-19, and even saw a rise in e-commerce sales.

“With Microsoft 365 and Teams, we were able to keep the non-operating functions going remotely as well—and with a remote setup through Microsoft DevOps with Nexer already in place, we could also continue developing our platform from a distance.”

One of these new developments was introducing a Microsoft Azure IoT Central solution, helping to further optimize 24Storage’s business by collecting data from different sensors within each facility—such as electricity consumption, temperature, humidity, and even local weather forecasts. 

Through Microsoft Power Platform, this data can be used to create a centralized view for field services, allowing 24Storage to dispatch technicians and fix problems before they happen, further ensuring these facilities can continue to operate without anyone onsite.

“There’s big value here, not just with cutting costs, but also making sure every facility is at the optimum level for insurance purposes,” concludes Elwin. “And it can help with the customer rental process too. 

“When people move out of a storage unit, it needs to be checked before it can be rented out again. So with this data, we can quickly prioritize that unit and create a much faster turnaround so it can be freed up for sales again.”

Expanding across Sweden and beyond

As 24Storage now looks toward the future, the company has plans to expand its digital offering outside Sweden, which is now an achievable goal with the scalable platform it has in place.

“Our plan is to continuously develop this Microsoft platform to stay relevant with user expectations,” says Sandelin. “New technologies like the Azure IoT project will help us further optimize our facility management and create opportunities for new products and services—allowing us to continue fine-tuning this customer experience for years to come.”

“They’re really focused on growth and opening three to four new facilities each year,” adds Hök. “It’s a very aggressive group target, but they’ve gone from zero to the second biggest storage company in Sweden—and that’s all down to their innovative business model and the Microsoft technologies they are using today.”

With a clear mindset to try new things and push innovation, 24Storage’s digital-first approach is a testament to how even the most traditional services like renting space can be enhanced through technology. And in today’s remote-working world, these innovations are sure to help keep the company ahead of the competition as it continues to expand its on-demand service in years to come.